As used herein, an agricultural input product includes, but is not limited to, any good, equipment, machinery, infrastructure, computer hardware, software, location-determining receiver, supplies, seed, fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, fungicide, pesticide, feed, medicine, and any other items that are used by producers to perform agriculture-related work. A producer means any grower of crops or plant-life, any producer of livestock or both. Sellers of agricultural products may provide incentive programs (e.g., purchasing programs) to market their agricultural products to the producers.
An incentive program may require a producer to conduct a transaction related to one or more agricultural input products under specific terms and conditions. The incentive program may induce the producer to participate in the program by providing fiscal or economic incentive to enter into the transaction. The terms and conditions may be based upon the financial qualifications of the producer, land resources of the producer or other resources of the producer.
In accordance with previous business practices, the producer may select an incentive program after consultation with a retailer on the available incentive programs. For example, a retailer may provide paper brochures on various incentive programs. If a producer was interested in an incentive program, the producer would need to arrange financing on his own with a lender that was appropriate. For example, the producer may contact his local financial institution or another lender for a loan to purchase the agricultural input products associated with the incentive program. Accordingly, a producer might need to provide his financial or biographical data in a duplicative, disjointed, and time-consuming manner, first to the retailer and later to the lender.
The lender may conduct a personal interview of the producer-applicant that is expensive because of the labor costs or other factors. The personal interview may only be justified for the lender for financial transactions that exceed a minimum threshold amount. Rather than conducting a personal interview, the financial institution may gather the application from the producer by mail or other seemingly low cost alternatives. Nevertheless, even the mailed information from the producer generally entails the labor costs associated with clerical processing and some nominal investigation by financial service workers. After arranging financing, the producer may return to the retailer to engage in the incentive program.
Under the foregoing previous business practices, the loan application process was generally disjointed from the incentive program selection process and awkward for the agricultural producer. The producer may not wish to participate in the incentive program or another promotion because of the difficulty and inconvenience of procuring financing. Further, the protracted loan approval process, and attendant transaction costs of the lender and the producer, may detract from the financial performance of the lender. Thus, a need exists for an integrated approach for facilitating an incentive program or providing financing for the incentive program.